Crossing the Line
by clara-eloise
Summary: Bella looks back on her human time with Jacob. Is it too late to change what you regret, even when you are a vampire? Winner of popular vote and Independent judge's vote on 'the air/the sun.'


Crossing the Line

You should burn.

It doesn't take much. Just a broken shell and a flickering match. When you've already been combusted in devouring flames, it doesn't seem like a whole lot more to thole. Ever since they dressed you as a virgin sacrifice in tottering heels and threw you to the lions you have been waiting for the punch-line, anyway.

You should burn.

Just as soon as you solve the problem of the line and the fact you just can't stay away from it.

It's there, hovering, invisible and utterly indistinguishable to human eyes as anything other than forest, ocean drift or crumbling tarmac. There is a deep throaty scent of wolf that should repel you and instead draws you in to ghost the line. You've been doing it for days - La Push road until you hit the treaty line; veering off west through the forest; running the line until it hits the ocean and you plunge down the cliffs.

It's not the first time you've tried cliff-diving. Even then he was there to pull you out the water and empty your drowning lungs.

It's an image that has burned itself to the inside of your unblinking eyelids. Soaking wet dark hair with ocean water dripping off the end of his nose on skin that's pure honey. Brown eyes that manage to look soft and hard all at the same time, saying: _What the hell were you thinking? _

In your personal library of lifetime moments you edit in more Jacob thoughts: _What did you expect would happen? That you could marry a vampire and have a normal life? That he would be able to have sex with you and not half kill you and need to turn you anyway? Huh, That didn't work out so well, did it?_

The Jacob voice always ends in recrimination inside her head. And she has time now, to replay scenes from their so short time together over and over again, adding her own bitter subtitles.

A kiss, on a mountain. Her only warm and real teenage human kiss.

_Had your chance_

Jacob, in agony and flooded with morphine, broken.

_Should have held on to him and never let him go._

Dancing, feeling his white cotton shirt and being held in his strong arms with that radiant-but-sad smile as he tries to joke and his mouth twists.

_Even then all he wanted was for you to be happy. Instead you skipped your merry way to the pyre._

Pretending to sleep, defrosting next to the heat of his body in a tent. Filled with want.

_You were just mortified in case _He_ found you out. _

You know sex now. Or at least how it feels to be penetrated by ice, melded to a Stone God. You gave yourself as a warm and living plaything while all your friends and family looked on with worry behind their eyes, and all His friends and family looked at you as if you were already dead.

_Welcome to the Family._

Grim, frozen smiles.

You _asked_ to burn, of course. Begged for it.

Little pyromaniac playing with Prometheus.

_Bite Me. Make me Like You. I Want You Forever._

Your lost human voice. Like static on an old tape recorder.

You can burn. It's easy.

So is waiting. There's no boredom or restlessness anymore. You can stand in the summer rain and feel every raindrop fall from the sky with your eyes closed before it even hits your perfect upturned face. You can taste salt, dust and smoke from a raindrop. You can sense when it's fallen through a rainbow.

As a human you were a flat paper cut out doll, eyes crayoned on by a small child, looking out upon a world you barely understood. Now you see with the eyes of a great artist. Every moment looking upon the landscape is viewed with the perception of a carefully constructed Andrew Wyeth or Albrecht Durer painting.

You stand, on the other side of the line, afraid of crossing**. **Trees with outstretched broken mossy arms drip soft green fog. Tall hemlocks and firs angle over the road creating a dizzying tunnel.

If you take one more step, you will cross the line.

Instead, you absorb yourself in minute details. The complexity of a Maidenhair fern – fiddleheads clustered together like triplets in the womb. Rusty sorus spores underneath each leaf, anchored in the soil, absorbing water and mineral salts, The onslaught of visual green with the various shades you can account for - myrtle, asparagus, celadon and hunter – mingling with the smell of chlorophyll.

Everything is growing now, except you.

And inside you, everything is incandescent red.

The dusk is approaching when the rain starts to smell of wolf. A pack of heartbeats grow more distinct as they approach from the east, running the line.

You sink to your knees, close your eyes and wait to be turned to charcoal.

"Bella?"

It's a young voice, concerned and full of genuine surprise.

"Seth, stay back."

So, Embry too.

The third?

"Jake, are you going to phase?" Seth's uncertain voice.

Then, even with closed eyes, you know him by his breathing.

It's faster than it should be, even if he has been running.

"Dude, stay back, she's not your Bella anymore." Embry's voice, urgent.

Then he's kneeling down, beside you, gently touching the ice-cold skin of your face.

You open crimson eyes and let him see that you've gone. That only a small portion of your human blood still lingers in your veins, and is inch by inch being ossified.

"Hey Bells," he whispers, eyes searching.

He holds your hands gently and it feels so hot – sparks to tinder.

You cannot help but follow as he pulls you up to your feet.

"C'mere," he beckons.

Between you is the treaty line.

Brown and white hands knitted together, hovering above it, like two sides of a mirror.

Then he pulls you towards him and you take a step into the familiar unknown.


End file.
